This is a sad, interesting story. I don't know all the background but Leeds is mentioned. I've had some stressful times in UK Unis myself but I've never made myself ill as a result.
Richard
Hi Richard,
Sad, but not surprising story... To my experience
the drive for constant change (even meaning the
necessity to change winning concepts for worse ones,
whatever you think is better or worse...) is not the
problem. To me the problem (in certain contexts) so
far has been the unwillingness to change no matter how
uncomfortable the established condition is. I am optimistic
and healthy anyway and I hope all other Moodlers are too.
Anders
This brings up some questions that have been nagging me for a while... My project at my school looks to run out of funding, the moodle installation will continue, but without support. I really don't feel like i had the arsenal that I needed to answer the beauracratic questions. Is there a list somewhere of answers to be given to administration about moodle regarding
1. How do i know it's going to be here in three years?
(well, in the software industry, no one is a guarantee. pkwrite. lotus 1-2-3. (I used to add leisure suit larry to this list, but it seems he has come back.., and even if it does go away, the code remains and we could work on it here at a lower pricetag than the enterprise models look to have in a few years)
2. Well, as soon as it gets popular, it's just going to do what webct did?
Actually, moodle's pretty popular now. webct started with the intention of being a commercial product, whereas, moodle was started on a different framework an... (dave pauses, wondering whether he should say the next words) open source business model. If martin went commercial, he might lose his development team, and in the end, that might not make it worthwhile, even if he wanted to.
3. Sure, what your telling me is this martin guy is doing it out of the goodness of his own heart. Even if i believe that, what happens when something else comes along that interests him more.
Well... there's actually a business model in place (dave says, assuming there is one, 'cause there seems to be) Martin has all the consulting and hosting work he could wish for, and really, which would you rather, working with a bunch of your friends, when you want, how you want, (remember this is a sales pitch, i realize martin must be when-ing and how-ing an awful lot, just to be posting as much as he does, let alone development and marketing) with no office to run and no massive infrastructure to worry about, or having a massive worldeducational empire that forced you to have to deal with a hundred little petty worries and not focus on the thing you want to do. (a difficult argument to make, as one does not want to suggest that the people one is trying to convince have made bad life decisions... which i don't)
4. Are you telling me he makes money at this?
yes. (dave assumes)
There are many more like this. Is there a repository of thoughts on the matter. My experience doesn't mimic the article exactly, but some of the themes are similar. I wonder what the percentage of educational products are chosen based on their inherent qualities.
"How do I know it's going to be here in three years?"
Well, in short, as you said yourself, you don't. IBM dropped their VLE (Learning Space) last year.
With open software the momentum is at first about the stamina and enthusiasm of the founders, but after a while it's about the quality and the quantity of both the developer base and the user base.
Moodle has a very large user base, involving large universities and other institutions. Where there is a will (and some money) there is a way. This is not always the case with proprietary vendor software.
With WebCT (for example) you have another question to make also: can we afford this in three years? That is, what guarantees you have that they won't change their licensing policy and pricing?
As there is no yearly license to pay with Moodle, you can at least be sure that you are able to run it until the end of the world if you like. If the development stops then there might not be updates for a while, but you could still run it.
There are also cases where a closed source company has discontinued a product but the user community has bought the rights to the source code and the product has then lived on as open source software.
Well, in short, as you said yourself, you don't. IBM dropped their VLE (Learning Space) last year.
With open software the momentum is at first about the stamina and enthusiasm of the founders, but after a while it's about the quality and the quantity of both the developer base and the user base.
Moodle has a very large user base, involving large universities and other institutions. Where there is a will (and some money) there is a way. This is not always the case with proprietary vendor software.
With WebCT (for example) you have another question to make also: can we afford this in three years? That is, what guarantees you have that they won't change their licensing policy and pricing?
As there is no yearly license to pay with Moodle, you can at least be sure that you are able to run it until the end of the world if you like. If the development stops then there might not be updates for a while, but you could still run it.
There are also cases where a closed source company has discontinued a product but the user community has bought the rights to the source code and the product has then lived on as open source software.
The license and pricing argument is a good one... and one i've used, but there's still something about trust in your argument, something that I think is important, but that many senior level administrators flat out don't believe in.
And the license thing can be a detriment. There are many people who still believe that nothing gets given away if it's any good. Or that you give things away as an introductory offer so that people get locked into it, then once they've spent the development money, you start to charge them (see webct).
One important factor is to emphasize that there are a lot of companies that provide commercial support for Moodle. (Some of them are listed at http://moodle.com) This way you get both the corrercialism and the "socialism 
". With Moodle you can choose to be somewhat locked in to a product/platform, but not at all to one single company. With WebCT (only for example, again) you get locked in to both, so it would seem like a more unconformtable situation when thinking about "what if they drop the product/support?".
Edit: About trust, and planting it: pick up some of the more known or larger institutions from the Moodle Sites list and say "Look, they are using it too. It must be good and trustworthy".
Edit: About trust, and planting it: pick up some of the more known or larger institutions from the Moodle Sites list and say "Look, they are using it too. It must be good and trustworthy".